If you benefit and learn from the FDP and enjoy our site, please help support us and become a Contributing Member or make a Donation today! The FDP counts on YOU to help keep the site going with an annual contribution. It's quick and easy with PayPal. Please do it TODAY!

This is yet another explosion experience. This happened in Kuwait several months after the Invasion in 1991. A heater malfunctioned in an armored ammunition carrier in a Self Propelled Howitzer Battery. It set off a chain of explosions that went on for around five hours.

It got little press back then. The 2nd Squadron of the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment (2/11 ACR) lost most of it's vehicles and this went down right in the main part of the camp.

No one died in the explosions that day, but three soldiers died during the clean-up when a round exploded. Around fifty were injured, mostly climbing over the wall, the only way to escape the raining debris.

Myself and the guys in my unit were trapped in a corner of the compound and had to climb out of the compound over our own security wall, which took some doing. Like always, I got out with out a scratch.

Something I forgot to mention... I have spoken in the past about a run in with a Camel Spider and a pack of horrifying dogs who were wounded and flea infested. That happened the night of this explosion. Our part of the camp was destroyed and uninhabitable, so we had to relocate.

In the video you can clearly see four very tall and distant smokestacks, with white and red stripes. That is the West Doha Power and Water Treatment Plant. My unit was called Task Force Victory (Forward), and about ten of us were the "advance party" sent to the Power Plant to see if we could occupy it. We found it to be infested with dead Iraqis, dogs that had been feeding on them, and associated vermin. I got bit by a verminous creature, either a spider or a flea, and wound up with gangrene in one leg. The morning after the explosion I was running a 105+ degree fever, was shaking with chills was and delirious. It took three levels of antibiotics to stop the bacterial infection that had turned my lower leg purple.

I appreciate your thanks very much, but my goal here is to share with you all the real behind the scenes deal that is military service. I'm sort of uniquely equipped to be able to do that in word and in art.

The truth is, I am thanking you for letting me share this with you. It's almost too much to carry around alone.

The military plays with a lot of really dangerous stuff everyday. They can be in harms way daily without being on the battlefield. Your post demonstrates this. Glad you came back without a scratch, WireDog. At least none we can see...

It got almost no reporting in the US. I called my Ma to tell her I was OK and she had no idea what I was talking about. My wife, in West Germany, saw it on German TV the day it happened.

Looking back, it makes sense that it was ki d kept under wraps. We were THE deterrent in the region to Saddam, whose army was bent but not broken. And we were a smoking pile of scrap metal, for the most part.

The logistical push to reconstituted the 2/11th ACR was a resounding sucess. Three days after the blasts, replacement vehicles from our vast bases in Saudi Arabia rolled in. That was a huge logistical achievement, very rough in those conditions. Depleted Uranium dust was everywhere. It will probably kill me some day, lol!

Moderators: Chris GreeneIron Manreverendrob
FDP, LLC Privacy Policy: Your real name, username, and email
are held in
confidence and not disclosed to any third parties, sold, or used for
anything other than FDP Forum registration unless you specifically
authorize disclosure.